Nightmare Not Over At Chernobyl Physicist Says Experts Still Battling Hot Reactor

May 8, 1986|By New York Times

MOSCOW — One of the Soviet Union's top physicists said Wednesday that the battle against the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was still a defensive one and that the large, damaged reactor continued to generate heat.

''Nobody has ever confronted a similar accident,'' Yevgeny Velikhov, vice president of the Academy of Sciences, told Pravda, the Communist Party daily.

''The unprecedented situation demands a solution of problems with which neither scientists nor specialists have ever dealt. A reactor is several thousand tons, and this gigantic mass is warming up.''

A Tass report from Kiev, meanwhile, gave the first indication in the Soviet press of disquiet in the Ukrainian capital because of the accident last month. It said long lines were forming for tickets to leave the city and that dozens of trains and flights were being added.

Grigory Revenko, party leader in the Kiev region, told Tass that when the Chernobyl area was evacuated after the accident, 1,100 buses in a column 12 miles long took people out of the danger area. He said Pripyat, the town nearest to the reactor, was evacuated in 2 hours and 20 minutes.

Tass reported some people had been hospitalized for poisoning in Kiev after taking home remedies against radiation, and the local minister of health had insisted on television that the situation required no medication.

The Pravda article described helicopters swooping to dump sand, clay, lead and boron into the reactor to contain radioactivity. Officials said 4,000 tons had been cast onto the damaged unit.

It described the scene at the control center set up by the team fighting the disaster in the town of Chernobyl, 6 miles south of the reactor, in terms of a front-line military staff in a time of war. Technicians and scientists in protective clothing, gathered from ministries and organizations across the Soviet Union, hurriedly moved about, consulting and issuing orders.

Pravda said Velikhov, a nuclear physicist, appeared tired and unshaven.

''Unfortunately, we still hold a many-layered defensive position,'' he said. ''We're trying to foresee all possibilities. Our main task is to safeguard people.

''As for the assault on the reactor, we're working not only beside it, but under it. Our task is to fully neutralize it, to bury it, as we say.''

The article did not elaborate further on containing radiation. But it gave a clear sense of continuing crisis and urgency that contrasted with bland assurances in official bulletins that ''measures are being taken.''

Chernobyl is among the towns in the 18-mile zone evacuated around the power station that shares its name. But in addition to the emergency headquarters set up in the regional party headquarters, Pravda correspondents described lines of trucks heading for the bank of the Pripyat River to raise dikes.

The government reported three days ago that the banks of the river, which flows past the damaged station and into the Kiev Reservoir, were being shored up to prevent contamination. The bulletin Wednesday said the project was nearing completion.

The bulletin also said radiation in the area of the station ''has substantially decreased.''

Pravda said the Kiev Reservoir, an artificial basin of 350 square miles north of Kiev, remained at normal radiation levels and river traffic was operating.

The Tass dispatch saying long lines of people sought to leave Kiev supported independent reports reaching Moscow of increased concern among some Kiev residents.

In the first week after the April 26 accident, winds carried radioactivity largely to the north and northwest. Press and television reports insisted life in the capital was entirely normal and unaffected by the accident. Western correspondents have been barred from traveling there.